Yesterday I recommended a humorous and justifiably salty piece by Sex, Drugs, and Mental Health regarding the predictability of anti-trans claims. Today I want to switch modes to one of their more serious recent pieces about the problem of ignorance. The author writes a good blag:

On any dimension of personal experience, people are experts in their own experiences. No-one knows more about what it is like to be me than I do, and no-one know more about what it is to be you than you do. I am more ignorant if we are talking about you, and you are more ignorant if we are talking about me. However, trans people invariably have some knowledge of cis people, cis experiences, the cis worldview. How can we not? We’ve lived all our lives in a society in which practically all information (including information about trans people) is produced by and for cis people. It is not entirely our own worldview. I am not cis. There are things about cis experience which do not speak to me, and do not resonate with my own experience, but which I have heard enough about to understand that they seem to be an important component of other people’s experiences. I am also familiar enough with the cis world to recognise that cis people are not all the same, and can have different opinions about things, even fundamental questions about identity and existence. Richard Dawkins and the Archbishop of Canterbury fundamentally disagree on many aspects of what it is to be human, but that does not mean that older white Oxbridge-educated cis men are not human. In contrast, many cis people are pretty ignorant about trans people. That’s not usually deliberate – up until relatively recently there was very limited media discussion, no information in schools, little or no specific guidance for professionals, and so on. Many cis people are actively and supportively trying to understand better. But there is still a backlog of ignorance, which includes a tendency to homogenise us, and to fail to recognise diversity of opinion within trans communities.

At the moment, particularly in the context of high levels of media scrutiny, this feels wearyingly restrictive on the conversations we as trans people want to have. Even the internal conversations we have amongst ourselves are prone to being hijacked by someone who blunders in and insists we explain ourselves and our experiences for them. To go back to the nuclear physicist at the party, imagine she and three of her colleagues are stood in the corner, quietly having a chat about their work, perhaps with a minor disagreement over some technicality and then someone else, with little understanding of the field, comes over and insists the physicists explain their work. Imagine the newcomer has had a couple of drinks, and is a bit belligerent, and takes overheard comments out of context, or misunderstands things. Imagine they insist that anything that can’t be explained to them in words of two syllables must be wrong or invalid. Imagine they keep going over and over the same trivial point, even though that has no relationship to what the physicists were actually trying to discuss. Imagine that they insist that the minor technical disagreement is proof that the entirety of modern nuclear physics is wrong and unproven. Imagine that the physicists’ attempts to simplify complex concepts for the sake of the outsider are seized upon, and then any further attempts to introduce nuance are pronounced to be inconsistent with what has already been said. Imagine that the physicists get bored of this, tell the newcomer to fuck off, and the newcomer spends the rest of the party complaining to everyone else present this is a violation of their free speech and they were only asking questions, and why are these physicists so hostile? That is what so many conversations about trans issues feel like at the moment.

You can find more here, and I recommend the blog as a whole.

-Shiv